For its 30th anniversary, Kneehigh Theatre has finally got a base in Cornwall: a mini-Eden project dome in a field. It's a tribute to the company's ingenuity that this is the most delicate structure: grass underfoot inside and a pane left open at the back of the stage, so you can watch the light fade, the colours change. It's the most outdoors you can be indoors.

Ten years on, and Emma Rice's production hasn't aged. If anything, it has renewed vigour and resonance, with its references to being an outsider and different as strong as ever in a new political culture. What's most thrilling, still, about this show is that it can be read on so many levels: as a folk or fairy story about some magic footwear, as a parable about desire, or a spiky tale about women's lives, or all three together and more.

The show takes the familiar, and renders it surreal and political, haunting and brave. The cast is reduced to anonymous universal archetypes: only the girl, with her red shoes, has any distinctive identity. It comes at a price, though, and the play works through the battle between life-affirming passion and alienating shame.

There are hints of suffragettes, concentration camps, anarchy, wise witches and kind butchers, and the fable as presented here is a blend of brilliantly simple visual richness and a kaleidoscope of ideas. It's a story about longing, about getting what you want and having to live with that as the delirious, half-crazed passion subsides. Mostly, though, this is intensely charismatic theatre about what it is to be alive and, as the witch says in the epilogue, the fate of "those who dare to dance a different dance".